


Untitled

by PhilipJFright



Category: LISA (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Hospitalization, Medical Trauma, Mental Health Issues, Neurodivergent Terry Hintz, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, child death implied, it's the end of the world as we know it and terry does not feel fine, lots of death implied, takes place immediately post flash so
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:35:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhilipJFright/pseuds/PhilipJFright
Summary: When Terry was younger, well-meaning adults would hear about his hospital stays and sadly call him a survivor, something he never quite agreed with. When the world ends, he's forced to find out if they were right.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One day I will write a fic for this fandom that isn't "Terry Hintz is a mess who was in the hospital a lot as a kid." Unfortunately, that day is not today.

There was a lot of confusion on that first day, and Terry slept through most of it.

He slumbered through the Flash itself— the hydrocodone he’d swallowed the day before had left him dead to the world— and when he woke up nearly a full day later and felt disoriented with the world around him, it really wasn’t anything new. He just chalked it up to a post-opioid haze. 

He’d find out later that there had been panic, men swarming in the streets, looting. That the haze Terry was feeling had less to do with painkillers and more to do with… well, nobody was sure, but it was probably a side effect of whatever had made all the women disappear.

When he woke up to his window being smashed, he just assumed he was being robbed, grabbed a baseball bat from under his bed, and tried to convince himself that he’d be able to use it.

He wasn’t being robbed and he didn’t have to use it, but he sat in his dark apartment for the next hour just clutching it, tense, wondering why a man would smash a window and then not bother to break in, and trying not to think, as he woke up fully, about why there was so much yelling in the streets below him.

Olathe was destroyed in smatters, some places worse than others. The bizarre weather would come later, but the initial changes were shocking enough— whole blocks blown away, somehow destroying buildings and structures while sparing any men inside. The strange thing, though, was that other areas seemed nearly untouched, aside from the missing women. A few suburban neighborhoods, a handful of industrial buildings, one or two apartment complexes stayed standing.

Terry was lucky, for once in his life. His apartment was left standing, and he didn’t realize that was an oddity until he finally put down his bat, cautiously went to patch up the broken window, and saw that the building across the street had been completely demolished.

Not knowing what else to do, half wondering if he should check the expiration date on his pain killers or see if hallucinations were a side effect he’d forgotten, he weakly fell onto his battered mattress and turned on the tv. Static, static, static, static— every station seemed dead, until he hit the local news. The tv station was a wreck, but seemed to be still standing, and the broadcast had been taken over, for some reason, by the weatherman, instead of the newswoman Terry was used to.

“So please,” the weatherman said, voice hoarse, hands shaking, holding up a picture of a young girl, “if you— if you are a woman or have any— if there’s a woman in your household please, please let us know, please call in, and… I— I know this isn’t— professional but— Christy, her name is Christy, she’s s— six, black hair, brown eyes- she’s s-six, if you’ve seen her— if you have any news on my gr-granddaughter, _please,_ please let me kn-know, I— again if you… if there are any women left in O-Olathe and— Christy, sweetie, if— if you can see this, call Grandpa, your dad-daddy said he gave you an e—emergency phone, please, call G-Grandpa—”

He turned off the tv, more confused than ever, his numbness breaking and turning into a soft panic as he processed what was being said— _if there are any women left in Olathe_ — and he grabbed his phone.

He hadn’t called his family in years, God only knew if this was still their number, and he was fully prepared to be yelled at and told not to call again but he had to know— 

“— Where’s Mom?” 

Terry wished he had hidden the panic in his voice, wished he understood why the thought that a woman who hadn’t wanted to speak to him in a decade could be gone made him want to cry, but he didn’t have time to think about it before his brother spoke.

_“They told you not to call, Rupert,”_ was the only response, and Terry didn’t know his brother’s voice well enough to tell if he’d been crying, and he didn’t have time to ask before the younger man hung up.

He tried calling again, he tried his other brother, he tried his father, he tried his mother, but either they were dead, or they were ignoring him, even at the end of the world, and he wasn’t sure which idea made him feel sicker. He had no one else to call, nobody else to ask after, and he stood, staring at his phone, stock still, hollow-feeling and numb as he listened to the chaos outside.

He turned on the news again, trying to drown out the sounds coming from outside his apartment, still unable to find any other channels that were getting any signal— nothing being broadcast out of Olathe seemed to be working— and listened to the weatherman call out for his granddaughter until a cameraman none-so-gently dragged him offscreen, asking anyone who had understood what had happened to the town to call in, asking people to stop looting, to stay in their homes, to remain calm, to, he repeated, _stay in their homes,_ and finally asking, “And… I think I’ll take the opportunity that Gary took here, I— if you’ve seen my sister, please, tell her to call me, her name is Jenny—”

Terry turned off the tv, curled up on his mattress, put a pillow over his head to muffle the sound in the streets below, and took the man’s advice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I actually have almost 6,000 words of this written and figured, "Hey, might as well release these sections as different chapters so I feel pressured to finish it!"
> 
> Other chapters might have more in-depth author's notes about headcannon stuff but this one's pretty basic. Guess all I can say is I'm a conspiracy theorist who doesn't actually think the world ended, I think Olathe was just fucked up and somehow separated from the rest of the world, which is why Terry can only get the news channel stationed directly in Olathe.  
> Think I'll post chapter two today, too, I think I might have six chapters by the end? Not entirely sure yet, though.  
> As usual, no ideas for a title.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suicidal ideation this chapter, be warned.

He didn’t leave his apartment for six days. 

Nobody called asking for him, nobody had cared to see if he had survived the apocalypse, and he hated how little that surprised him. Maybe he was at fault, too. It wasn’t like he could think of anyone to call but his family, and it would have been stupid to have expected them to call him back. He could have called a few ex boyfriends, maybe, former coworkers, but he knew that they wouldn’t be worried about him and didn’t feel like it was worth it to bother them.

Then he ran out of food, entirely. Well, he’d run out on the second day, basically, and had been surviving off a jar of peanut butter for the four days after, but day six was was when the peanut butter run out. The water had been shut off two days before, anyway, which was making surviving on peanut butter a far more miserable experience than it already would have been. 

A few people had tried to break in, and Terry still had that bat he knew he would never use, but the door to the place was sturdier than expected, and once people glanced through the window and saw how crap the place was, they generally stopped trying anyway. People weren’t quite desperate yet, or at least not desperate enough for a ratty old mattress, an old table, a single chair, a few posters and a shit tv to seem like prizes worth breaking a door down.The best thing they could have gotten from the place was a microwave and a bunch of pills, and only a small fraction of those were painkillers anyway. Not like anyone could get too high off Prevacid.

The encounters had still been nervewracking, each instance where someone had banged on the door had reduced Terry into a nervous wreck, curled up in the corner of his apartment, trying desperately to make himself small. The noise from the first day hadn’t stopped— if anything, the din outside just seemed to have grown. Screaming and car horns blaring had become the norm, and the air seemed permanently filled with smoke and a smell that almost reminded Terry of a barbecue, which he didn’t let himself think too deeply about. Thinking too much about bad things made them swirl around in his head, and he never quite figured out how to get them out.

He’d been rationing out his pills and inhalers— he still had a lot, but he was well aware that he probably wasn’t ever going to get another refill, and the fear of what would happen once he ran out almost scared him more than the chaos outside. Almost.

He wanted to stay longer, wondered briefly if it would be better to hole up in his apartment forever. He’d become completely dehydrated soon, and that’d kill him, but he’d been dehydrated plenty of times before, so maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go. The IV fluids always felt worse than the dehydration to him anyway, or at least the needle did… 

Or he could just take action for once in his goddamned life. He had plenty of pills, and he’d thought about how many it would take to kill him before, thought about it more than he’d like to admit. Painkillers and antidepressants and stimulants and prescription anti-acids, taking all of them at once— well, he had a weak heart, he was sure that’d make it burst. Maybe it’d be better to just take a handful and go to sleep. The thought was familiar, almost comforting in its regularity. Besides, he was barely coping with the noises from his apartment, there was no way he would be able to handle the world that was making those sounds.

He’d like to pretend, thinking back on it, that he’d snapped himself out of it. That he’d decided to trudge on, that he’d put on a brave face, that he’d found some courage inside himself and went, _no, no that’s not what I’m going to do, I’m going to live._ He tells that to himself later, that he grew a backbone and made a choice, because it sounds less pathetic, almost sounds heroic. He made a decision. He faced the world. He decided overdosing in a dingy apartment wasn’t a death worthy of him.

The truth was, he’d never been able to swallow his pills without water, and his toilet had run dry.

So he paced, and he talked to himself, pills in hand, trying to decide what to do. It wasn’t unusual for him to have discussions with himself— he’d always been quite the conversationalist, talented enough that he could carry both parts by himself— and he chatted alone in his apartment even in a good mood, whenever he felt the need to talk to someone. Sometimes it was grandiose fake interviews to adoring fans, but sometimes it was just talking about his day, or pretending he had someone interested in hearing about the book he was reading, a movie he’d seen, his new job. It didn’t mean anything was wrong, usually— or, well, maybe something was wrong, technically, his mother had always thought so, “healthy people don’t talk to themselves, Rupert, at least not out loud,” but it didn’t mean he felt _bad_ — but the conversation before he went outside was stressed, scared muttering, bargaining with himself as his palms sweated and the pills dissolved through his fingers.

He finally decided, out loud, that he wasn’t going to die in his apartment alone.

He was still talking to himself when he finally forced himself outside, bat in one hand, mushy pills in the other, but he was quieter now, barely audible, making sure not to move his lips now that people could see him. Nobody would have paid him much mind anyway, but he still felt like it was important, somehow, that he seem as normal as possible.

He just needed food, water, then he’d go back. He’d go back stocked up and he wouldn’t have to leave for another week, at least. 

He kept his head down, and tried not to look at anyone else. He was sure he wasn’t very threatening, even with the bat— he’d heard more than a few gunshots— but he probably wasn’t interesting either. A part of him, a large part, wanted to speak to someone, find someone to stick around, but it was a bad idea, probably, so he resisted the urge.

He wasn’t sure where he was going. Looting, maybe. He didn’t like the idea of breaking into anyone’s house, and he wouldn’t rob anyone that was home— even if he could somehow overpower them, he just didn’t have the heart, the idea of making anyone else scared or miserable felt almost unbearable— but maybe he’d… find something. In the trash, in an abandoned wreck, anything.

Trash was a no go, he soon learned. Most trashcans had been picked clean or set on fire by now. If there had ever been any pickings, he’d missed them.

Destroyed homes were slightly better, once he worked up the courage to enter them. He got a child’s backpack in the first house he went into, and he guiltily emptied it, putting everything in it on a broken table that seemed low enough for a child to reach, and writing a quick apology for taking the bag in the spiral notebook. There was a drawing inside the pack of a little girl dressed up in a getup that reminded Terry vaguely of Robin Hood, and he put it up on the remains of the fridge with a smiley face magnet. It seemed wrong not to display it. He left the notebook open in case the kid came back, added a note about how much he liked the artwork and a thanks for letting him borrow their backpack, and tried to convince himself that he wasn’t grave robbing.

Water wasn’t easy to find, but he managed to scavenge a few sodas from the back of an overturned taxi, and some juice boxes from a destroyed home. He avoided booze— his meds didn’t mix with alcohol and his mind was just quiet enough to realize it probably wasn’t a good idea to give him any more ammunition to off himself with. A few bags of chips and crackers and some other nonperishables were scattered here and there, and he thought about taking some frozen meals, but realized that his power was probably out at home. He hadn’t checked. 

He found some meds in a wreck near the old docks, in the remnants of what might have been a small apartment at some point. Amongst the broken beer bottles and children’s toys was an old nebulizer machine, with several foil packages of medicine that wouldn’t expire for a while. Terry had a machine at his place, but few meds, and when he realized that they were the specific off-brand Albuterol substitute he’d been prescribed, he chewed on his lip, tapped his foot nervously, then closed his eyes and swiped them. Whatever kid had used these was long gone. If this had been left behind, they didn’t need it anymore. And they probably didn’t need the antidepressants either.

He told himself that all the way home.


	3. Chapter 3

This system worked, by and large, for a year and a half.

By and large meaning, of course, that he survived, but he was surviving alone, and that was hell for him. It was a normal sort of hell, to be honest— he hadn’t had anyone important in his life before the world ended, after all, he hadn’t had anyone in general for a while, but… at the very least, before, he had had contact with other people. Cashiers at a grocery store, commuters on the bus, people on the street he could intentionally bump into to hear an “excuse me” or a “sorry,” or even a “hey, watch it.” They didn’t even have to be nice interactions, just… someone to acknowledge that he was there, that he took up space. A bit of face-to-face communication to convince himself that the one man conversations in his apartment were to sort his thoughts out, instead of out of desperate loneliness. But nowadays, he worried that bumping into someone on the street might get him killed, and the busses had stopped running on day one. The grocery stores had been looted clean.

It was a flash flood that forced him out of this fear-induced isolation, something that had started to become more common around six months after the end. Weather was getting weird, unpredictable, and bouts of heavy rain were starting. Later, it would turn to droughts, mountains erupting, lakes and swamplands springing into existence, areas that were hot as hell and areas that were somehow covered in snow, unpredictable night and day cycles— whatever had ended the world had seemingly done so with a vengeance, not content with just killing off half the population, but insisting on making the survivors live in confusing, uninhabitable chaos.

His apartment was on the third floor, which just went to show how bad the flooding was. He woke up realizing he couldn’t breathe, which wasn’t abnormal, and even the feeling of water in his lungs wasn’t too odd, he’d had enough serious pneumonias that felt like that, so it took him a few seconds to realize that he was drowning.

The water was only, thank god, up to his chin once he stood up, but he still spluttered and fell back into it a few times, panicking. He wasn’t sure what to grab, what to take out of the apartment, so he ended up grabbing random odds and ends and shoving them into his pants pockets. He’d later find that all he had managed to take was a few bottles of aspirin and an old beanie baby he’d had since he was a child. He wasn’t sure whether to try opening the door or opening a window— he doubted he had the upper arm strength for either, and when the water reached over his lips, he realized he was running out of options.

So he plugged his nose, grabbed his backpack, which, hopefully, had some meds inside, and certainly had a bit of food, and tried the door.

It didn’t budge, the water pressure surrounding it must have been too great, so he tried for the window, grateful he had never quite gotten around to repairing it.

He cut himself up pretty bad smashing the already broken glass and shimmying out of the frame, but after a lifetime of being poked at and cut open, he was used to pain. 

Once he was out he was unsure of what to do, very much aware that he wasn’t athletic enough to tread water for very long, and eventually, he just resorted to lying on his back, staring at the sky, trying desperately to float. 

By the time the flooding stopped, the water had reached the seventh floor. Terry had lost the backpack and he was still coughing and sputtering, trying not to convulse too much, for fear of sinking.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to get any windows open, and he decided not to waste his energy trying. He was drained beyond belief, between the coughing, the water treading and the blood loss, and he knew that, without parcelling his energy, he’d drown for sure.

The roof of the apartment was another floor up, and Terry wondered if he’d be able to reach it. He’d always failed rope climbing in gym— he’d always failed gym in general, or been passed out of pity— and he just didn’t think he had the strength to cling onto the rusty storm drain and pull himself up an entire story, and he wasn’t sure it was even worth the energy to try. It might be easier just to bleed out in the water, or let his lungs fill to the brim. Water-filled lungs couldn’t feel that much worse than pus-filled ones.

Again, it was fear that stopped him. He thought it over for a long while and started to let himself sink, let the water around him turn red, and then he opened his mouth, tasted his own blood mixing with the filthy water and he panicked, which only resulted in him swallowing in even more, burning his lungs. 

He was too scared to die like this. This wasn’t pneumonia, this wasn’t familiar, and he couldn’t trick himself into thinking it was. And again, his mind screamed at him, screamed that he couldn’t die alone, he couldn’t die without anyone caring that he had existed, so he splashed his way to the surface, spit up in the water, once, twice, and tiredly made his way to the storm drain.

He was right in his assumption that he wouldn’t be able to climb all the way up— he almost managed it, but he wasn’t able to maneuver himself around the place where the roof jutted out— but clinging to the storm drain left him upright, able to survey his surroundings better, and he was able to see that, by some miracle, one window on the eighth floor had been left open.

It took a long time to shimmy across the building, desperately searching for uneven bricks and pockmarks in the surface where his hands and feet could grip. Several times, he thought his muscles would give out, and several times he thought he was going to fall, and in the half hour it took, he considered letting go more than once. Then he remembered the taste of the blood and the burning in his lungs and he carried on.

The apartment seemed like the same model as his, and it wasn’t furnished any nicer. The only real thing of note was a small collection of records and CDs that seemed to have been hastily rummaged through, as if whoever had lived here had been searching for one in particular before leaving in a hurry. 

The minute he stepped into the room, he collapsed, face-first into the ground. He honestly wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get up again… after being in the water, he had no real way of telling how much blood he’d lost, and even now, he couldn’t stop coughing. When he felt his eyelids start to close, he wasn’t sure that they would open again, and he was too tired to feel very much about that other than a vague, empty loneliness, and a hope that, if someone found his body, they’d at least feel pity for it.

He was shocked when he woke up the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is like, the same length as all the previous chapters put together, and I'm still working on it. Hopefully it'll be finished soon.  
> Also, I hc Terry's apartment as being where the swamps end up developing, ergo, flooding.  
> Trying to make sure this fic isn't just a constant stream of bad things happening to Terry, but that's kind of what it's turning into.


	4. Chapter 4

He tried finding a group after that, someone to stick around. A large part of him had wanted to from the beginning— he hated being alone, more than anything, and his old therapist had told him, years ago, that he was better when he didn’t isolate, whatever “better” meant. All he knew was that when other people liked him, he actually managed to like himself.

Isolating had been so easy, though, and had seemed smarter. The world outside, which, to be frank, had always confused Terry and made him a bit nervous, had grown hostile in a way he wasn’t sure he could handle, and he had seen enough bodies on his excursions for supplies to know that people were probably not to be trusted. 

But without his apartment to isolate in, he had no out. Staying in the eighth-floor flat felt wrong, and it was stupid to stay somewhere surrounded in water anyway.

So when Terry left that apartment, he decided to make himself easy. Helpful, willing to do whatever was asked of him for a sliver of companionship. 

It almost worked. He spent time in newly-formed bars, nervously made overenthusiastic conversation with people, played himself up, told them he was all the wonderful things he had never believed himself to be, and latched onto anyone who made conversation back. Hell, sometimes he latched onto people who didn’t. Anyone who didn’t flat-out tell him to leave, really.

He’d always had a hard time making friends, ever since he was young. He liked to blame the hospital for it— he’d grown up sick, away from other kids so often, it was no wonder he couldn’t connect with them. He hadn’t had the opportunity to develop social skills, and their experiences were so different that even when he got the opportunity to talk to kids his own age, they didn’t have much to talk about. But he knew that wasn’t it, deep down. It was him. It was something about the way he talked to people, the way he just… failed to connect, no matter how hard he tried. The way he always managed to talk a little too long, or how the words he said never seemed to quite come out right— how jokes didn’t always land and how his mouth would jump ahead of his brain and push him into saying just the wrong thing. 

He was bad at reading people, until it came to reading annoyance or frustration. Then he became an expert.

Occasionally he found someone to spend some time with, and sometimes they were even decent company. His standards had never really been high, just letting him hang around had been enough for him to consider a person a friend, since he was little, so he didn’t turn down companionship that was less than kind. It was something, at least. A face to talk to, or to talk at, a warm body to be near. 

The thing was, people never stuck around. Sometimes he was allowed to tag along for a week or so, but oftentimes it was only a few days. Sometimes it was just a night. People didn’t really want him to stay long, they weren’t looking for friendships or relationships, or at least not with him.

It took a long time for him to stop trying. He was persistent when he wanted to be— his dad had called it bullheaded. 

He started making hints again.

He hadn’t thought about his hints since he was a kid in the hospital, scrawling out what needles to ask for if your veins were collapsable, (butterfly needles, and request a paramedic, they nearly always get it in one poke,) and how to keep yourself occupied when your parents stopped visiting, (movies, drawing, reading and story writing, and video games, if the systems in the playroom were working and you weren’t quarantined,) sticking them to the walls of the pediatric ward. They’d been something to do, and he’d taken pride in them, but mostly… he hadn’t liked to see others scared. By the time he was seven, he was a pro at hospital life. He knew what was safe to eat in the cafeteria, what a good pulsox reading looked like, how to distract yourself so the pneumonia treatments felt less like beatings and how to take a swallow study without getting barium up your nose. He’d learned how to fill long days without visitors, and how to convince yourself that people outside cared if you got better.

Other kids hadn’t.

So who was he not to give advice? 

A few nurses had told him, long ago, that they kept his posters up and read them to kids who were squirming through blood tests and hiccuping through ultrasounds, and that sometimes it calmed them down. Not always of course, but sometimes, and sometimes had been enough for Terry.

He didn’t understand this world quite as well yet, but he was a fast learner, and he scrawled hints on any scraps of paper he could find. Some of them were specific to surviving in the new wasteland, things about scavenging, finding groups, staying out of the constant sun, but some were more general. Try not to take drugs, try to keep your energy up, be wary but don’t attack first. Try and stay decent.

That one, he noticed, got taken down nearly as soon as it was put up.

He wrote his name on all of them, at first, his given name, in case anyone was interested in finding him or knowing he was alive, but eventually that tiny impulse died down, and he signed off with nicknames instead. Revived his Hintlord persona from when he was small, decided to join the ever-growing fraction of the population that had resorted to alter egos. 

(He’d never really liked the name Rupert anyway, it was somehow both too posh and too harsh for his tastes, and made him uncomfortable for a reason he couldn’t quite describe. Terry had been a name he’d liked since he was a kid. It suited him a lot better.)

So he tried and he tried and he tried and he tried, he clung to anyone who passed him by and tried so hard not to be too much, not to be too annoying, to be helpful and useful and he ended up alone again each time. So he’d try again, go into another bar, hang around shops where the vendors didn’t seem sick of him yet, just making sure there were people out there that not only knew he existed, but didn’t mind that he did.

It took four years to drain him completely.

He kept putting posters up, but he stopped talking to people in bars. He still didn’t want to be alone, he still hated the feeling, but he could only take apathy and rejection so many times. Constant dismissal and an inability to be seen as anything but disposable had taken as much of a toll as the loneliness had on his sense of self-worth, maybe more. Sometimes he tried to think of what his old therapist would suggest, whether isolation was better than desperately trying to get someone to stick around, but the last time he’d seen to his old shrink, the man had been plastered on potato liquor and sobbing about his wife, and hadn’t recognized Terry’s face even when he explained who he was, so he wasn’t sure how good his advice would have been.

He’d already found a small, secluded area and built himself a shack. People didn’t bother it too often which was good, because, as much as he was starting to understand this world, he hadn’t grown any more adept at surviving it. The few times he’d been forced into a fight had been miserable experiences where he thought he was going to die, and would have, if his assailants hadn’t decided he wasn’t the fun kind of pathetic and that beating him up was just sad. So a place tucked away was just… smarter. It kept him alive, kept him out of conflicts.

It made it so much easier to keep to himself once he finally gave up.

He started building more shacks.

It felt like he was helping someone, helping neighbors that didn’t exist. He’d go to bed for the night and look at the half-built shacks and feel like he was in a community, feel that he had company, that he was giving that company shelter. When the shacks were finished, he scrawled out hints, rules for living in the community, as if there were people to follow them. No littering, no fighting, pay respect to the founder of the town.

Things spiraled from there.

He was good at playing pretend, he always had been, and the Land of Hints was not the first escape that Terry had ever made. Any hospital stay longer than a week ended up with the room plastered in drawings and rules, discarded paper cups and pencils and occasional crafting supplies from the hospital playroom turned into dolls to keep him company. A tiny kingdom to rule over, something to feel like he was loved and in control.

He’d never had a real village to rule before, but he was an adult now, and more than up for the responsibility.

The dolls he made had the same names as his old ones, and he found that he remembered their stories well— who liked who, who fought, what their jobs were. They were characters he’d made, of course, not real people, so he had full creative control, but they were familiar and comforting so he didn’t change much. 

He knew they weren’t real, he always knew. But the whole world was playing pretend by now, running around in costumes, so he didn’t see the harm in joining them.

He painted a mural, crafted masks, made a throne— a mattress, which only seemed fitting. He’d always ruled his kingdoms from a bed.

It was like all aspects of his old life had merged into one strange entity. He would keep to his village, his mattress throne and his imaginary friends, and it would be familiar, like an extended hospital visit, without the nuisance of getting an IV flushed. And when he would go out, scavenge for supplies, put up posters, he would make sure to talk to at least one person, even if it was just a shopkeeper, and it was like making conversation with the cashier at a grocery store again, making sure someone had acknowledged that he existed before he went back to his empty apartment. 

The loneliness he had carved out for himself now felt more like home, like something normal. A type of hell he was used to.

He got visitors, once, a group of men pushing pills, and he couldn’t ever be sure whether he had driven them away, or his refusal to try a drug he knew next to nothing about.

It wasn’t as if he’d never heard of Joy before— it had sprung up everywhere after Olathe became a wasteland, spreading all over the place like some sort of weed. He’d occasionally been offered some, but he’d always refused. His health had made him paranoid to try any drugs that weren’t prescribed to him, scared about what the side effects could be, and he didn’t like taking pills anyway. 

The men who came to his village, claimed, when Terry refused the pill with that explanation, that their leader had helped develop it, that he’d seen the initial side effects and that a heart defect shouldn’t effect him any. When he mentioned an esophageal defect the leader’s lips twitched and, while Terry couldn’t see his eyes from under his helmet, he could sense annoyance. When he mentioned stomach problems, he didn’t have to just sense annoyance, and the men in masks were fidgety, frustrated. By the time he got to his lungs, the annoyance had turned to impatient anger.

He would learn, much later, how lucky he was to have gotten out of the encounter in one piece.

That night, his routine of saying goodnight to all his villagers just didn’t help to ease his loneliness. The faces of his fans looked so much like the masks that the men had worn, the actual, living, breathing men, and saying goodnight to these dolls felt more like a pathetic sham than it ever had before. He stayed on his throne that night, gazing over his town, and wondered whether the men would have stayed if he’d just accepted the pills, even for a few hours. Or, even if they hadn’t, if the pills would have helped with the empty, hollow feeling in his stomach.

They’d said it would make him feel nothing. That had to be better than feeling small.

The throne was shoved precariously on a rather high cliff, and wasn’t the safest place to sleep on. When he woke up the next day, he realized that he wasn’t as relieved that he hadn’t fallen off as he probably should have been, and the realization that he was back to simply not caring if he died made him feel worse than the actual danger he had put himself in. It wasn’t as if he’d been doing well, but it always felt like a defeat when he found himself like this again.

He broke his routine that day. He didn’t have the energy to go out, put up any hints, and the thought of talking to his fans just left him with a hot, nauseous feeling in the bottom of his stomach. 

It was pointless to talk to them, but he’d always known that, somewhere in his mind, so he would let himself acknowledge it for today, wallow for a bit in the loneliness, scoot up against the cliff, far from the edge in case he got any stupid ideas, and tomorrow he’d force himself to go back to his routine.

This feeling would pass, and he knew it, because it always did, but he still couldn’t think of any hints to write the next morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love that the end of this chapter can be summed up as "Terry asks for Buzzo's PHD and somehow doesn't realize he nearly got himself murdered."  
> Sorry for the delay, I just really could not figure out how to end this chapter, still not thrilled with this one but it's fine, doesn't have to be perfect. I think we might only have one more to go, I'll probably end it right before he meets Brad. Next chapter is the first one that hasn't been planned out, so that should be... fun.  
> Also, side note, I know that when Dingaling said that Terry Hintz wasn't his rela name he probably meant, like, "His real last name obviously isn't Hintz" but I like projecting and Terry is a gender-neutral name, so the information that "He changed his name" and his current name is gender-neutral was enough for my nonbinary self to project, so, yeah. Not important to the story, but Terry's nonbinary. Rupert is his canon middle name, I chose it as his deadname because Terry strikes me as the kinda guy who might feel guilty about changing his name and might keep it as a middle name to "make up for" choosing another name, and because I cannot see him actively choosing the middle name "Rupert" for himself.


End file.
